getting out there

Month: November 2017

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Today I will get on my 1956 Raleigh Superbe roadster and trundle through the muck of Bidwell Park in 38 degrees to attend a city of Chico Finance Committee meeting. I’m just guessing on the temperature, that’s what it was on my patio yesterday at 8 am.

I’ll tell you why I do it – I hate surprises. Discussions are had at these morning meetings – by the time an issue gets to the full council meeting – sometimes years later – it’s been decided, and there’s a very small window for running any type of referendum. Council meetings are little more than rubber stamp sessions. Every now and then a councilor takes a stand – usually because he/she knows an unpopular motion is going to pass, and they can make a show for the peanut gallery.

I’m giving up a morning’s work for this, and I always go back and forth on attending these meetings. I know my husband would like me to quit and pay more attention to our private affairs, but he’s intelligent enough to know – these people make decisions that land like monkey wrenches in our personal lives and business. Decisions they’ve made over the last five to ten years have taken Chico down quite a notch – you just had to be here to watch the bums roll in, the streets crack up, our premier park – one of the largest city parks in the continental United States – turn into a rambling bum camp full of invasive non-native species and rot. Meanwhile the cost of housing has tripled. Ten years ago we talked about Economic Development – now whole meetings are devoted to worsening crime, financial deficit, and giving of raises to city management. I know – that last one doesn’t make sense, does it?

Today they will put the stick to local developers, telling them they need to pay drastically higher fees – or, start building higher densities. Real developers – people who build homes – know the buyers want a bigger house with a yard. But $taff tells us these high density subdivisions will bring lower impacts (and out of the other side of their mouth, they remind council more housing brings more property taxes…)

So I get on my old ‘cycle and head Downtown – for what? To be a witness? Surely nothing I do will make any change. Or will it? Never know until you try.

I’m conflicted on Thanksgiving. For one thing, it’s so forced, so frantic – like, Release the Lemmings! Looking at the tv news, I see people lined up in airports, cars lined up on the roads. On the home front, I try to get my groceries by the Tuesday before, shop for at least three or four days, because something really weird happens to the average shopper on Wednesday, and the desperation makes me nervous. I’m afraid somebody’s going to carjack me over a can of cranberries.

I mean, I’ve seen full grown men, pushing a shopping cart full of kids, none of whom have been in a grocery store more than three times a year, wandering the aisles of Safeway with this frightened expression, a tiny slip of paper in hand. That either means, Mom is at home getting ready for company, and she’s sent the pack of them out of the house on some fool’s errand so she can have 5 minutes peace, or it means, Mom didn’t have time to shop, God help us.

Yeah, that’s the other thing – this holiday largely falls on the backs of women, who feel some sort of weird pressure to show the world that while they work 40+ hours a week they still know how to put a gourmet meal on the table for a family of 10.

On the other hand, it’s a food holiday, and you all know how I love to eat! And I love to see my kids sitting across the table. So we start early and enjoy ourselves at home.

We haven’t done a turkey for years, too much work, but the best turkey we ever did was on the bbq with indirect heat. Here’s a good blog for bbq:

We do most of our meat on the bbq or smoker these days – with the smoker, we can cook a big quantity of meat ahead, relax the rest of the holiday weekend. We already had an enormous chicken we’d bought at Safeway – we watch for whole chickens to go on sale at 99 cents a pound and we usually buy at least two. But we needed something else to make it worth firing up the smoker, so Tuesday we went out, hunting and gathering. At Cash and Carry we found a pork shoulder roast for about $11, just the right size.

My husband had the meat in the smoker by 10 am. The chicken only takes a few hours, but the pork had to be on for 10 hours, and then foil wrapped and loaded into the oven for the finish. My husband explained to me, taking the meat up to 200 degrees breaks down the fats and proteins and gives it that stringy texture we all love – pulled pork!

My son pulled into town about 2 pm, the smell of smoked chicken greeted him in the driveway. We carved the chicken Tuesday night and over half is sitting in the fridge for tacos tomorrow night. The pork was ready for sandwiches yesterday at lunch and tacos for dinner last night, we’ll finish off the rest over breakfast, maybe have another sandwich for lunch.

We asked our kids last week what they wanted to eat for Thanksgiving dinner and without a pause they answered “steak.”

We get meat from Grandpa once a year when he butchers a steer, and when we’ve eaten all that we go to Cash and Carry for a big boneless rib roast. This time we bought a real whopper, cause we wanted steaks to send home with our kids. My husband cuts them with his super sharp filet knife, and I stand by with a box of plastic film wrap and a big freezer bag. I wrap each steak and stack it in the bag – when we want a steak I can separate them with a spatula. I’ve done the calculations, and depending on the price, it has worked out between $5 – 6 for a steak big enough to feed two adults, with leftovers for breakfast.

A steak dinner really takes the stress out of Thanksgiving.

Cash and Carry also has a good deal on asparagus, and they have bags of small potatoes for about $4.

So what am I grateful for this year?

It’s always good to have swell kids and a great spouse. It’s good to have a home that you love. It’s good to live in California – as much as I gripe about The Moonbeam. I’m thankful for the family that raised me to be tough and mean, while also showing me how to enjoy the little things that make life great.

Happy Thanksgiving, however you spend it, whatever you eat with whomever, I hope it’s a good day for you.

We had a few nice days camping before the rain came back. Check out that sunrise – and people ask me why I would want to live up there.

Back in Chico, me and the dogs are holed up in the house again. When the rain let up for an hour or so around noon, we went out to see what there was to see. I notice the grass I’d planted outside my front door is finally coming in, on a dead heat with the weedlings.

In this weather grass actually has a chance.

Good thing my husband hauled out the rain barrels.

My cactus garden loves this weather.

Toward the end of Summer, when it was just DRY, my nopal cactus had started to wither, it was shocking – the leaves began to wrinkle up like raisins. As soon as the weather turned wet they started to swell up, so much a few leaves actually broke off from their own weight – see the leaf laying on the ground there next to the strawberry pot. I notice they can rip very badly if they fall off by themselves, so I’ve been watching, and when they start to sag I cut them off with the loppers. I save them in an old planter pot and plant them elsewhere when I find a spot. They last forever, just sitting there in the pot, looking sad, and then you put them in the ground and look what happens!

No it’s not pleasant working outside in a dumper, but I got plenty of other stuff to occupy my time. Back to The Hoard.

Last Spring we sold an old rental, and my older son, who was living in the “mother-in-law” unit with his girlfriend, had less than a week after the new place was available to get their stuff out of the old place. They tried to save time by moving a bunch of stuff into our garage. I have to laugh – moving is so frantic – they took everything. Once the panic had settled down, they looked at their mish mash of boxes and realized, a lot of it should go either to the thrift store or the trash. Since they both have real jobs now, I’ve finally decided to take on the job of sorting through their stuff. I found out – a lot of it belongs to my husband and I, junk we’d left behind in the garage at their apartment when we moved off the property.

I’m always asking my husband, “what is this and is it usable?”

Sometimes he laughs and thumbs toward the trash pile, other times he says, “wow, I forgot that…” The other day we found my mom’s old can crusher.

Score!

My mother was a consummate hoarder, where do you think I got half my junk? She also drank Pepsi out of the can, it was like her oxygen tank. “Where the hell is my Pepsi?!” A child of the Great Depression, she never threw away any type of metal. She saved her Pepsi cans for the neighbors kids, and sometimes she’d even drive the whole pile of kids in my gramps’ ’66 Chevy pick-up to the scrap yard to turn the hoard into cash.

I’ll never forget how shocked the neighbors were when she died – one said, “she just took the kids to the dump last week…gave ’em all $5…” Yep, that was my mom!

Mom’s garage would get cluttered with cans sometimes, and the neighbor kids weren’t always around to help, so her boyfriend got her a can crusher – what a romantic! My mom loved stuff like that. Screw it to the fence, drop in the can, pull that lever and VOILA! That’s French for “Holy Shit!” Can comes out looking like it’s been had-over by an 18-wheeler.

They don’t call it The Crusher for nothing.

When my mother died I saved everything – including a Post It note I found on the refrigerator – “call the kids” The can crusher went in my husband’s shop, along with other relics – tools and farm junk. My husband is also a hoarder, that’s why it’s so tough to throw anything away around here. I was pretty excited to find it again, because my husband has recently switched to canned beer. I like the cans better, they aren’t as heavy, they don’t break, and they don’t seem to hold as much residue – so they don’t stink as bad as bottles. And now I can crush them to roughly one-tenth their original size – they take up almost no space, and we can take them to the recycling center in old dog food bags. We don’t have to go as often either, and the trips are more lucrative.

And I can’t tell you how fun it is smacking down those cans – listen, an old bitch like me has got to let off a little steam once in a while. It’s fun imagining that I am putting one or another government flak catcher in there and SMASH!

I rolled over in bed at about 4 am and hollered, “Stop it!” I yelled so loud I woke myself up.

My husband rolled over to answer, “It’s not me, it’s the rain gutter…”

We realized, when we cleaned our gutters, we forgot to put the board back. There’s a downspout that takes run-off from a big section of roof, and when the rain really gets going, the stream hits the gutter below like a hammer. It’s right out side my son’s bedroom, so he noticed it the first rainstorm. He and his dad climbed up on a ladder and fitted a piece of scrap wood into the gutter, and that seemed to be the ticket. It dulled the persistent wham! wham! wham! to a livable thumpthumpthumpthump.

So today we’re going to get up there and take care of that – it’s one of those things you can’t ignore, sounds like somebody’s trying to tear the house down.

In the meantime, I couldn’t sleep anymore, having woke up enough to feel all the aches and pains, I had to get up. I stumbled into the kitchen, led by the glow of the little light on my coffee pot. Badges follows me out every morning, bumping at my elbow with his nose – he likes me to move his bed to the spot next to my computer chair when I get up, so he can lay next to me while I clatter at the keys.

On a day like today, I have to sit in the dark and think, “What day is it? Am I supposed to be dragging my garbage cans out to the curb?” No, which is always a relief. But this morning I realized, it’s Monday, and Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away. My son is coming home for an extended weekend, and I have to clean out his room. We have a really bad habit of putting stuff in there.

For example, two old people don’t need six dining chairs, so there they go into the boy’s room. And so on. The bed is covered with boxes of junk I been sorting to throw out or whatever. The shelves are all disheveled from my attempts at reorganizing. Opening the door is always a shock – I don’t go in there too often. I thought I would make my “office” in there, but found, it’s kind of a sad room without a boy living in it.

I’ll tell you what else – having an empty room in your house makes it way too easy to HOARD! Too easy to put off throwing stuff away – hide it in there, decide later…

There’s a difference between storing something you have regular but not constant use for – like dining chairs – and stuff you just can’t throw away, “because it’s still perfectly good…” even though you have no use for it, now or in the foreseeable future. I know – take it to Good Will!

Would you believe, the thrift stores in our town suffer periods of glut? Especially at the end of the school year, when college students vacate our town by the carload. My husband and I tried to take in a load of stuff in July, and were turned away from two stores. Salvation Army no longer takes donations at their stores located around town, we are expected to drive to their facility at the airport.

I’ll tell you the truth – half of it went into the garbage can when we came home. I took a hard look at it – old linens, old clothes – who wants those? Those went into the trash. I looked again – a lot of stuff we’ve been left with by tenants who never came back to get it. A perfectly good cast iron pan with lid – I already have the identical pan. Kitchen gadgets. A stack of paperback books.

Today I will stack it in the garage, and this week I will load it into the car. I find the holidays are a good time to take stuff to the thrift stores. It will feel good, it always feels good. Probably not for the reasons it should feel good, but it will feel good.

I’ve always loved watching bugs, ever since I was a kid. One day in third grade, while my teacher was going on at length about contractions, I was watching a new butterfly break it’s way out of a chrysalis on the outside sill of the classroom window.

So I was pretty excited when I met my insect neighbor, Mrs. Mantis, and she didn’t seem to have any problem with my presence, even crawling up onto the water spigot while I was using it, waving her little forearm as if in greeting. I watched her gorge herself on meat bees that would otherwise have been mobbing my dogs, and I enjoyed watching as she daintily cleaned her face and hands after every meal.

I worried as I watched her struggle to lay her eggs, the weather turned mean almost overnight, and she couldn’t crawl up the slippery cement siding on our shack. So she laid her eggs at the bottom of the door. I’d seen them in stranger places, and I was glad she didn’t set her case in the door frame where it would get squashed.

And every time I approached our little shack, I’d look for that egg case.

And one morning it was gone.

Life is full of trials and tribulations, it’s funny which ones will set you off. This made me very sad.

And as I was wondering what might have happened, I noticed a little pile of mouse turds and some ground up junk.

All that remained of Mrs. Mantis’ little family.

Mice are something we’ve had to deal with ever since we bought this place. The trailer that was set up on the property seemed full of them, we’d clean it out and next time we’d come they’d be in it again. They loved the oven, which they stuffed with fiberglass insulation from the walls, a big pink nest.

Finally we sold that little trailer to an aficionado who tore it apart and restored it. We bought a newer trailer that had been properly maintained. The mice worked furiously to get in that trailer too, and when I found turds in the kitchen cabinets we realized – trailers are a sitting duck for mice.

So we sold that trailer and began work on our our shacks – the first was a tiny shed for the toilet, then a 10 x 12 for sleeping and cooking. It’s been easier to keep the mice out, but they’re always there, waiting. Whenever we aren’t there for more than a few days, somebody sets up housekeeping on the threshold of the cabin door, I always find a pile of turds there.

So I shouldn’t have been shocked – nature is so violent! Mice have to eat. I don’t know why I don’t feel the same empathy for the mice or the meat bees – maybe because they’ve been a nuisance. We’ve trapped mice and thrown them in the garbage without a whimper, and I have stood over the dog dishes with a flyswatter and racked up meat bees like trophies.

But sometimes you meet a bug or an animal or a human that seems to look right into your mind and touch something familiar. I’ll keep looking for that.

Fall came quickly – it’s easy to forget that streak of 110+ last June, seems like a long time ago. It’s nice to work outside, still warm, but not so dusty. Time to clean up, and time to plant some stuff for Spring.

I planted a garlic bed a couple of weeks ago.

Some of these are getting big enough to eat.

I finally gave up trying to grow garlic bulbs. Garlic takes a lot of water – during those dry winters, I had to water it every day, and it still didn’t make much of itself. On some tv cooking show the host was using it green, leaves and all, so I pulled out a half dozen shoots, oiled and salted them, and put them on the grill with some meat. The leaves got really crispy, tasted great. And the bulb is a little taste treat – not sharp like you’d expect, but sweet and mellow.

Fresh green garlic is also nice to mince into salad dressing, gives it a whack.

You can plant garlic crowded if you’re not going for big fat bulbs. My shoots are getting big in this rain.

I also decided to rehabilitate a section of lawn I didn’t kill off, a nice patch right under our crepe myrtle tree. The shade from the tree protects that little section, right outside our front door, it’s nice to have. So as soon as the heat let up I bought a bag of grass seed at Northern Star Mills – it’s cheap, and you get to use their hundred year old scale to weigh it.

I never get tired of watching grass grow.

First I had to hoe the weeds out – there were several places where the barrel clover and other “weeds” had moved in and killed big patches of grass.

I’m leaving the crab grass, it helps hold the new grass. Later it will be one big carpet.

Some of those plants have amazing root systems – every time I thought I was done I would find more. But, I also found, there was a lot of grass left, it just needed some TLC. After I hoed out as many weeds as I could find I raked it good with a metal rake to loosen up the dirt.

I had to water it twice a day until the rain came. Now I’m ready to plant more, get it in before it gets too cold for the seed to germinate.

Bob suggested the bear in this homemade sign should be replaced with a pig.

I hadn’t heard about the rally until the day of, two hours before it was to start. I suspect this was because it was organized by our local congressman, Doug Lamalfa, who has been on the hot seat with local liberals lately, and probably

didn’t want them to show up. I think that’s kind of a (‘scuse me children) pussy attitude Doug. I get tired of their antics myself – at the last public event I attended, they screamed “liar!” and “shut-up!”. But, Lamalfa needs to show a thicker skin. And they should just remove people who don’t know how to act at a public event.

So he ran this one under the wire, inviting only those who already agreed with him. That’s not very effective.

Not to mention, they chose to have this protest two days before the tax was to take effect – today. A hell of a lot of good that is – and not very genuine, I’m afraid.

Where was the angst when this bill was winding it’s way through the legislature?

State assemblyman Jim Nielsen made some good points about how it would a

ffect our puny lives – not only will the price of gas go up, higher than any other state in the nation, but this tax will add a hefty chunk to car registration.

And, Nielsen pointed out, they’ve promised to fix the roads before – remember Prop 50? As soon as that tax passed, The Moonbeam was on the news saying it wasn’t enough! This money will go straight into the salaries and pensions deficit.

While I enjoyed the rally for a few minutes, my husband and I were right in the middle of the work day. I’d been doing dirty work all morning, but when my husband said he needed to run an errand on that end of town, and we could not only check out the rally for a few minutes but take the dogs out, I put on a clean shirt, socks and shoes and jumped in the car.

Jim Nielsen is a good speaker, natural, and he made it clear – Californians are being ripped off, the gas tax hasn’t been used to fix the roads.We timed it perfect, arriving just in time to miss that idiot gasbag James Gallagher, and just as Jim Nielsen was taking the mike. I don’t always agree with Nielsen, but he made all the pertinent points – this tax is aimed straight at working people.